Broadway Boogie Woogie

Last updated
Broadway Boogie Woogie
Piet Mondrian, 1942 - Broadway Boogie Woogie.jpg
Artist Piet Mondrian
Year1942–43
MediumOil on canvas
Dimensions127 cm× 127 cm(50 in× 50 in)
Location Museum of Modern Art, New York

Broadway Boogie Woogie is a painting by Piet Mondrian completed in 1943, after he had moved to New York in 1940. Compared to his earlier work, the canvas is divided into many more squares. Although he spent most of his career creating abstract work, this painting is inspired by clear real-world examples: the city grid of Manhattan, and boogie-woogie, an African-American Blues music Mondrian loved. [1] The painting was bought by the Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins for the price of $800 at the Valentine Gallery in New York City, after Martins and Mondrian both exhibited there in 1943. [2] Martins later donated the painting to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. [1]

Contents

Analysis

When Piet Mondrian arrived in New York he became fond of the neat, rigid architecture. He integrated the mood and tone of jazz into this work. Mondrian called it the “destruction of natural appearance; and construction through continuous opposition of pure means - dynamic rhythm.” [3]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Museum of Modern Art</span> Art museum in Manhattan, New York City

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Abstract art</span> Art with a degree of independence from visual references in the world

Abstract art uses visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world.

De Stijl, Dutch for "The Style", also known as Neoplasticism, was a Dutch art movement founded in 1917 in Leiden. De Stijl consisted of artists and architects. In a more narrow sense, the term De Stijl is used to refer to a body of work from 1917 to 1931 founded in the Netherlands. Proponents of De Stijl advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of form and colour; they simplified visual compositions to vertical and horizontal, using only black, white and primary colors.

Boogie-woogie is a piano-based music style.

<i>Victory Boogie Woogie</i> Last painting by Piet Mondrian

Victory Boogie Woogie is the last, unfinished work of the Dutch abstract painter Piet Mondrian, left incomplete when Mondrian died in New York in 1944. He was still working on it three days before dying. Since 1998 it has been in the collection of the Kunstmuseum, in The Hague. It has been said that "Mondrian's life and his affection for music are mirrored in the painting [and that it is] a testimony of the influence which New York had on Mondrian."

Events from the year 1943 in art.

Charmion von Wiegand (1896–1983) was an American journalist, abstract painter, writer, collector, benefactor and art critic. She was the daughter of Inez Royce, an artist, and Karl Henry von Wiegand. Karl Henry von Wiegand was the German-born journalist known for wartime reporting.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harry Holtzman</span>

Harry Holtzman was an American artist and founding member of the American Abstract Artists group.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Piet Mondrian</span> Dutch painter (1872–1944)

Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan, after 1906 known as Piet Mondrian, was a Dutch painter and art theoretician who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He is known for being one of the pioneers of 20th-century abstract art, as he changed his artistic direction from figurative painting to an increasingly abstract style, until he reached a point where his artistic vocabulary was reduced to simple geometric elements.

Sidney Janis was a wealthy clothing manufacturer and art collector who opened an art gallery in New York in 1948. His gallery quickly gained prominence, for he not only exhibited work by the Abstract Expressionists, but also European artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Paul Klee, Joan Miró, and Piet Mondrian. As the critic Clement Greenberg explained in a 1958 tribute to Janis, the dealer's exhibition practices had helped to establish the legitimacy of the Americans, for his policy "not only implied, it declared, that Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Phillip Guston, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell were to be judged by the same standards as Matisse and Picasso, without condescension, without making allowances." Greenberg observed that in the late 1940s "the real issue was whether ambitious artists could live in this country by what they did ambitiously. Sidney Janis helped as much as anyone to see that it was decided affirmatively."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Burgoyne Diller</span> American painter

Burgoyne A. Diller was an American abstract painter. Many of his best-known works are characterized by orthogonal geometric forms that reflect his strong interest in the De Stijl movement and the work of Piet Mondrian in particular. Overall, his Geometric abstraction and non-objective style also owe much to his study with Hans Hofmann at the Art Students League of New York. He was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists. Diller's abstract work has sometimes been termed "constructivist". He also did figurative and representational works early in his career working as a muralist for the New York City Federal Arts Project.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ilya Bolotowsky</span> Russian-American painter

Ilya Bolotowsky was a leading early 20th-century Russian-American painter in abstract styles in New York City. His work, a search for philosophical order through visual expression, embraced cubism and geometric abstraction and was influenced by Dutch painter Piet Mondrian.

Daniel R. Schwarz is Frederick J. Whiton Professor of English Literature and Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University in the United States where he has taught since 1968. He is the author of eighteen significant books and numerous articles, many of which have appeared in prestigious journals and collections of essays. His recent book is Endtimes? Crises and Turmoil at the New York Times: 1999-2009 (2012) speaks to both scholarly and general audiences. He has directed nine NEH seminars and has lectured widely in the United States and abroad, including a number of lecture tours under the auspices of the academic programs of the USIS and the State Department. He was a founding member of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature and served as its President from 1990 to 1991. He has held three endowed visiting professorships. He was a guest Fellow for short periods at Oxford (Brasenose) and Cambridge (Girton) in the UK. He has been the President of the Cornell Phi Beta Kappa chapter since 2009.

<i>Boogie Woogie</i> (film) 2009 film

Boogie Woogie is a 2009 British black comedy film directed by Duncan Ward and produced by Eric Eisner and Leonid Rozhetskin. It is based on the 2000 novel of the same name by Danny Moynihan, who adapted his own book on the New York art world of the 1990s and titled it based on the unfinished 1944 Piet Mondrian painting Victory Boogie-Woogie.

Martin Samuel James was an English-American art historian known primarily for his translations, with Harry Holtzman, of the writings of Piet Mondrian into English.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maria Martins (artist)</span> Brazilian sculptor, designer, writer, painter, writer and musician

Maria Martins was a Brazilian visual artist who was particularly well known for her modern sculptures.

<i>Composition with Grid No. 1</i> Painting by Piet Mondrian

Composition with Grid No. 1 or Composition in Grey and Ochre is a 1918 painting by the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian. It is currently in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

<i>Womans Head</i> (Picasso) Painting by Pablo Picasso

Woman's Head is a 1939 painting by Pablo Picasso. It is a depiction of Dora Maar, Picasso's companion at the time. Picasso donated the work to the people of Greece in recognition of their resistance against the Axis during the Second World War. Woman's Head was first exhibited in 1949, alongside other donated works, at the Institut Français in Athens. It was not shown again until an exhibition starting in 1980 at the National Gallery and was on continuous show from 2011 until the gallery closed for renovation in 2012. In January 2012 Woman's Head was stolen from the closed gallery, alongside a painting by Piet Mondrian. It was recovered from a gorge near Athens in June 2021 and the alleged thief was arrested.

<i>New York City</i> (painting) 1942 painting by Piet Mondrian

New York City is an oil-on-canvas painting by Piet Mondrian, completed in 1942. It is on display in the Musée National d'Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France.

References

  1. 1 2 "Piet Mondrian. Broadway Boogie Woogie. 1942-43 - MoMA".
  2. Smith, Roberta (10 April 1998). "Art in Review". The New York Times. Retrieved 23 September 2014.
  3. "Piet Mondrian". Moma. Archived from the original on 2015-08-04.